The South African state has responded favorably to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) social movement organizations (SMOs) efforts to protect and extend sexual and gender minority rights, whereas Namibian state leaders have verbally attacked LGBT organizing and threatened to arrest sexual and gender minorities. In these countries, LGBT persons have organized themselves into publicly visible social movement organizations (SMOs) over the last ten years. Amid such different official responses to LGBT organizing, how, when, and why do Namibian and South African LGBT social movement organizations become publicly visible or retreat from visibility? To answer this question, I turn to sociologist James M. Jaspers (2004, 2006) concept of strategic dilemma. LGBT social movement organizations encountered strategic dilemmas of visibility or invisibility when they decide whether and how to become visible, modify their public profile, or forgo political opportunities. To understand the micropolitical dynamics of how LGBT social movement organizations negotiated such strategic dilemmas of visibility and invisibility, I engaged in intensive, continuous ethnographic observation of four Namibian and South African LGBT social movement organizations for approximately 800 hours and analyzed my ethnographic fieldnotes. I also analyzed more than 2,100 newspaper articles and LGBT SMO documents and conducted 56 in-depth interviews with staff, members, and leaders of LGBT SMOs. In this dissertation, I explore the varied strategic dilemmas of visibility and invisibility that Namibian and South African LGBT SMOs faced. My findings advance social movement theorizing by demonstrating the importance of studying social movements in the global South. In addition, my findings contribute to postcolonial feminist and queer theorizing by showing how marginalized sexual and gender minorities in post-apartheid Namibia and South Africa used public visibility as a strategy to argue for their democratic inclusion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-07022007-132909 |
| Date | 19 September 2007 |
| Creators | Currier, Ashley McAllister |
| Contributors | Paula J. Davis, Eric O. Clarke, Cecilia A. Green, Akiko Hashimoto, Kathleen M. Blee |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07022007-132909/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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